Will it be easier to make secure forks post-merge?

The Ethereum Classic chain has suffered a number of 51% attacks because, basically, who's going to waste GPUs mining ETC when they could mine ETH instead?

But after the merge to proof of stake, it would be rather easy to set up a validator for another network alongside Ethereum. So if something like the ETC fork were to happen, the next chain could be more legitimate because it would already have a network of validators (and I'd bet a significant fraction of them would decide to validate for the new chain because, why not, free money)